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Security, just like privacy, is one of these things that generates a lot of noise and heat, yet only people with vested personal interests are really worried ab

Security, just like privacy, is one of these things that generates a lot of noise and heat, yet only people with vested personal interests are really worried about it. Users don't give a shit. I've seen tons of support emails confirming this. They will continue to download and launch viruses just because their friend who sent them an infectious link thought that sheep jumping from under your windows look funny. And they will disable any software jail that stands between them and the sheep or the singing cat photos. Most security-minded consumer software only makes everything else work worse, slower and annoy the hell out of people. It saddens me enormously that everything but port #80 on the Internet is blocked, everything except HTTP is banned and most users of my application will be threatened and screamed at by their own computer simply for trying out what I'd built. This security hysteria not only doesn't work, but it chokes the innovation, restricting us to sit forever in this little crippled world of Mozilla/IE/WebKit runtime with 90% of what a computer can do unavailable to us. JVM has been around for nearly 15 years, being many times more powerful than Mozilla and WebKit's wildest dreams, yet it has failed outside of data centers because it never allowed OSX programmers to write true OSX programs or Windows programmers to write true Windows programs, and I see no reason why browser-based "boxes" will be different. And you need true OSX programs if you want the consumer market. For the enterprise - yes, they eat anything, users of enterprise software get paid to use that shit, but if you want software markets to strive, if you want people to open up their wallets, you'd have to do a lot better than that. Otherwise we'll be locked forever in this eyeball market of free crap supported by canadian pharmacy advertising.

Retric 18y ago
Let's take the average user who goes to www.cwtv.com and installs a plug in to watch their videos. Now if it works that's great, but what if there are problems? What if you install an old game that messes with your system? What do they do next? Users want the systems that "just work", so adding something as simple as an OS level uninstall that always worked would be a major boon that people would notice. Is it really that hard to build an OS that protects it's self from unintended harm? Plenty of people buy Ant Virus software for a wide range of reasons but it helps is enough to make the developer a lot of (Edit: Money). PS: I am suggesting that VMware, Java and all the others don't own the market at this point. It's much like search before Google where it almost works, but nobody seems to be focusing on the real problems.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  A lot of this is a matter of packaging/marketing. Technology that looked a lot like the JVM had been around for well over a decade. One way to think of the success of Java, is that it "packaged" such technology in a way that was attractive to a large user base. Most security software is not packaged and marketed in a way that is really attractive and useful for end users. From what I've seen, it's usually good for the nerds, but a bit of an obscure PITA for the average Jane/Joe. Contrast this to OS X's incidental low virus rate through obscurity. Now that was packaged and marketed very well to end users, and I'd wager that quite a few users paid a pretty penny for it. Technologically, there was hardly any substance there. The technology is already out there. Whoever manages to package it for end-users is going to cash in big time. (Witness Dropbox. The ability to diff a directory and create a recoverable log of the changes has been around forever. They're just succeeding at marketing it to end users.)

Retric 18y ago

Let's take the average user who goes to www.cwtv.com and installs a plug in to watch their videos. Now if it works that's great, but what if there are problems? What if you install an old game that messes with your system? What do they do next? Users want the systems that "just work", so adding something as simple as an OS level uninstall that always worked would be a major boon that people would notice. Is it really that hard to build an OS that protects it's self from unintended harm? Plenty of people buy Ant Virus software for a wide range of reasons but it helps is enough to make the developer a lot of (Edit: Money). PS: I am suggesting that VMware, Java and all the others don't own the market at this point. It's much like search before Google where it almost works, but nobody seems to be focusing on the real problems.

stcredzero 18y ago
A lot of this is a matter of packaging/marketing. Technology that looked a lot like the JVM had been around for well over a decade. One way to think of the success of Java, is that it "packaged" such technology in a way that was attractive to a large user base. Most security software is not packaged and marketed in a way that is really attractive and useful for end users. From what I've seen, it's usually good for the nerds, but a bit of an obscure PITA for the average Jane/Joe. Contrast this to OS X's incidental low virus rate through obscurity. Now that was packaged and marketed very well to end users, and I'd wager that quite a few users paid a pretty penny for it. Technologically, there was hardly any substance there. The technology is already out there. Whoever manages to package it for end-users is going to cash in big time. (Witness Dropbox. The ability to diff a directory and create a recoverable log of the changes has been around forever. They're just succeeding at marketing it to end users.)